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A spice odyssey: “Jodorowsky's Dune”

New film document director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ambitious, but doomed, attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s “Dune” to the big screen.

Oklahoman
Published: April 25, 2014

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After the success of the cult films El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), producers were more than willing to finance visionary director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s next venture. When asked what kind of picture he wanted to make, Jodorowsky answered “Dune.” He had never read Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi opus, but he knew it was a high-water mark in the genre. After securing financial backing, what followed was an ambitious, perhaps too ambitious, undertaking. Jodorowsky’s Dune chronicles the director’s efforts to assemble cast and crew for the creation of an innovative and quixotic film. But in the end, the adaptation was never made, at least not by Jodorowsky.

Step by step, Jodorowsky guides us through the early stages of the ill-fated film’s development. He sought out an artist to storyboard the production. French illustrator Jean Giraud, who goes by the pseudonym Moebius, signed on, and filmmaker and artist sketched out the entire production, with a script by Jodorowsky. Early in Frank Pavich’s documentary, Dune seems fated to be made as coincidence after coincidence piles up. Everyone Jodorowsky wanted for the project gravitated to him as if by magic. Soon, other artists came aboard, including Dan O’Bannon, who was in charge of visual effects for John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974), and Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger. When it came time to begin assembling a cast, Jodorowsky went to great lengths to get his dream team. The cast included David Carradine, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dalm - whom the director courted over months. Dalm’s fee to do the picture was $100,000 per minute of screen time. Jodorowsky also found a very overweight Orson Welles gorging on a meal in his favorite restaurant. Welles agreed to act in the film after the director promised to hire the restaurant’s chef so Welles could eat like a king on set. Jodorowsky’s opening shot for Dune, depicted in the documentary in an animated sequence using Giraud’s original artwork, was directly inspired by Welles’ celebrated tracking shot at the beginning of Touch of Evil (1958). Jodorowsky’s son Brontis, who had appeared in “El Topo,” trained for two years to star as the film’s lead, Paul Atreides, learning swordplay and fighting techniques. Pink Floyd signed on to score certain sequences. Moreover, the illustrated script, replete with production notes, wardrobe details, and color reproductions of artists’ set concepts, was beautifully produced. Those who saw the script considered it a work of art in itself. Copies were sent to the major studios in Hollywood, and presumably they’re still there.

Pavich had plenty of access to Jodorowsky, who is now in his 80s, while making “Jodorowsky’s Dune.” Jodorowsky’s narration dominates the film. He envisioned the project as a spiritual experience and potential masterpiece, and he brought to his adaptation of the novel a metaphysical, wildly imaginative dimension. We don’t get an opposing viewpoint, but there are hints that Jodorowsky’s ego got in his way. There was no way the film could be cut to run in what the Hollywood studios saw as an acceptable screen time: an hour and a half. The epic sci-fi film - intended, according to the director, to produce a hallucinatory experience in the viewer, not unlike LSD - would have run at least 12 hours long. In the end, he refused to compromise his vision for what he describes at one point in the documentary as the most important film in the history of humanity.